All the food you can tweet

Just when you thought restaurants couldn’t get any more ridiculous, along comes Core.

this new one by Gordon Ramsay protégé Clare smyth has just opened in London’s Notting Hill. It offers tasting menus, including one for £95 (plus a bold 15 per cent service charge). Is she having a laugh?

Our menu included a potato course (half a small spud, titivated with a teaspoon of herring eggs), a carrot course (a bit of carrot dressed with lamb gubbins) and a skate course, featuring a thumb- sized piece of skate, one of the cheapest and unloveliest of fish. still hungry? Here comes the sorbet course, hurrah.

Naturally there is an open kitchen, where chefs use gilded tweezers to garnish these dwarf dishes with micro herbs while wearing the expression of someone performing open-heart surgery on a dying puppy. the main dish was a scallop (singular), which looked very pretty but was overcooked — perhaps the team were too busy ironing the petals of an edible gossamer pansy to notice. A great number of restaurants have become so obsessed with profit margins that the food/turnover balance has become hopelessly corroded. It looked to me as if the raw ingredients for this tiresome ‘banquet’ couldn’t have cost much more than a fiver. Is this what happens in a world where customers are more interested in taking photographs of their food than enjoying it? sad if so.